Earlier this week I read a post entitled ‘Marmite:Love it or Hate it? – Using Google forms and Twitter‘ by Tom Barrett. He has planned to use both over the next two weeks with a year 5 class to explore data investigation and the post detailed what his class did for their first investigation. It was very interesting to read how he used his Twitter network to give the class real life data from real people and it got me thinking to try out something similar with my own class.

Yesterday I revised the use of data collection with my Year 4 class by asking them for their answers towards the following question,

What is your favourite type of music from the following – rock, pop, R&B, blues, rap, country, classical, dance, jazz?

They used a tally chart to collect their data and then used Excel to gather their results and create graphs. This led to a discussion that many of us like different types of music and not just one so we devised further possible questions and methods to collect the data. This morning I created the survey for my class but posted the link to it to my network on Twitter. The response was fantastic and before 11am I had received over 50 results with which to show the class. We discussed which type of music was most popular (Rock) and what was the least (Rap) and they offered the following responses,

everyone answering is a teacher and they don’t like the same music we do…they’re old and only like rock…they have bad taste

I then created a bit.ly link for the class after Tom’s suggestion that it’s much easier to use than the full google doc url. The children sat in pairs and filled out the same survey and we then rechecked the results and found, unsurprisingly, that children don’t have the same tastes in music as adults (R&B was top!).

What's your favourite music?

The data that we now have will be used next week in further Maths lessons and the children added that they will continue to use the survey over the weekend at home and with friends. Real data from real people. This is what makes this type of investigation so very useful and brings an added dimension to data collection activities. The children also discussed who would find this data most useful and their answers were fantastic,

Radio station so they know what music to play…record producers so they know what music to sell…singers so they know what music people like

You can view all the results using this link. And if you want to, here’s the survey to complete.